Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

It’s not often that a broadcasting orchestra finds itself acclaimed among the finest in the world. But that’s what happened in 2008, when the UK’s Gramophone magazine placed the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks (Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BRSO) high in its World’s 20 Greatest Orchestras—the only radio orchestra so honoured. The Munich-based BRSO was founded in 1949 under the auspices of Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), with Eugen Jochum its first Chief Conductor. Under his successors Rafael Kubelík, Colin Davis, Lorin Maazel and Mariss Jansons, it maintained a consistent reputation for the quality of its concerts and recordings. Having made his debut with the orchestra in 2010, Simon Rattle becomes chief conductor from the 2023-24 season, with the promise of a new home to replace its primary concert venues, the acoustically compromised Philharmonie am Gasteig and the postwar Herkulessaal. Its rich, central European sound is ideally suited not only to the Romantic repertoire, but also to 20th- and 21st-century music. With a series of new and archive recordings now being issued on BR’s own label, in recent years the orchestra has won awards for discs of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 "From the New World" (1893) under Andris Nelsons, Beethoven’s Missa solemnis (1823) and Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 in D Minor (1896) under Bernard Haitink, and Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (1887), Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 (1953) and Rachmaninoff’s The Bells (1913) under Jansons.